I had just been suspended from the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe – square, dull and traditional. "Min" was none of those things. He might have had the gown, tweeds and gravitas, but we boys sussed something about him – like old Spencer at Holden Caulfield's school. "Min" was "cool". We weren't. I really wasn't. I was a rather pompous twerp from Chalfont St Peter – a callow virgin barely out of shorts with golf divot hair. But I wanted to be "cool". So I bunked off with my rebel friends to Mac's café to listen to Little Richard and Eddie Cochran and lust after the High School girls who looked like the Shangri Las. We got suspended for two days – just like that Holden Caulfield.

I went home – where I was fabulously misunderstood – and read Catcher. It knocked me out. It clicked. Holden was everything I wanted to be. His life in New York was just like mine in Chalfont St Peter. I too was the only nutter in the village. I too was clever and sensitive and hacked off. I too boiled uselessly when a girl approached. But above all, it was Holden's voice that did for me. Authentic. Honest. No bullshit. It flattered me. It was cool to be fed up. Cool to be wretched. Holden Caulfield knew. Just like Nigel Molesworth knew, just like "any fule kno", and that Billy Liar. I went back to school and told my hugely sensitive friends about it. We carried it around like a badge.

"Thank you sir!"

These days it's a set text. I taught it to lower sixth formers. Would it also work with them? It's always a bit risky to teach your favourites. You just end up enthusing madly and getting fed up if they don't. What would cool, tough west London teenagers do with Catcher? They've seen it all. They've done everything. They've had an ample sufficiency of teenage rebels. They've moved on. It's Lily Allen not James Dean these days.

Some loved it like I did. Especially boys – especially the pale and haunted ones. They too were knocked out by Holden. By that no-bollocks voice. They compare it to Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers. And to The Smiths and Nick Drake and Elliot Smith and other seriously fragile singer-songwriters. But others just didn't get it. Especially girls. They deemed Holden Caulfield a self-indulgent arse, "a narcissistic tosser who's just up himself". Nick Hornby, they said, does it so much better.

I contained my disappointment. They might even be right. That kind of innocence is a luxury. I'm not even sure it's a novel for adolescents. I'm a crusty, unsentimental old git and I like it more than ever. It's more tragic, more heartbreaking – and rather lost on tedious, insensitive modern youth.